Fglrx is a proprietary, Linux binary-only driver for ATI graphic chips with support for 3D acceleration.

Packages

The ATI drivers have explicit permission for repackaging and redistribution of the Linux drivers. Many distributions are supported within the installer, and many more repackaged by external developers. Please visit the Distribution Page at the Unofficial ATI driver Wiki

Status

8.1: Fixed suspending on kernel version 2.6.23 or later. Custom code in xorg.conf will no longer be ignored.

7-12: FireGL support, fixed memory leak when running OpenGL applications, X -configure no longer results in a segmentation fault. Connecting a display device that supports 1680x1050 may result in a maximum display resolution of 1280x1024 only being available.

7-11: new versioning scheme, kernel 2.6.23 support. Required for Xorg server 1.4, but does not support FireGL cards. So don't upgrade to Xorg 1.4 if you have one!

8.42.3: Composite support added enabling AIGLX and Beryl/Compiz on the desktop. Support for (most?) FireGl cards dropped (should be restored in upcoming versions)

Known problems and solutions

User experience

Speed

How much is the speed gain versus the opensource drivers?

Compared to the old drivers, approximately 40% speed gain have been noticed with fglrx. However, there are issues with freezing/garbage after suspend, garbage when resizing desktop (via ctrlaltplus, ctrlaltminus), and garbage while using VMware. The current 8.14.13 has shown 400% improvement over using the open source radeon driver: 1200 FPS for glxgears1!

However the situation seems to be changing significantly as time goes on. With recent x11-drm-20060608 driver (gentoo) and thinkpad t42 (ati 9600) the speed is confirmed as 1900fps and stable. As of October 2007 there is dramatic improvement in the open source 3d drivers in speed and stability.

However, you can use either regular Xv video overlay or make the video an opengl texture and let the OpenGL engine scale your video. This has nothing to do with the acceleration of 2D drawing primitives. Further, your mileage on performance may vary depending on what card you have. The open source drivers don't support newer cards, while the ATI drivers don't support older cards.

You may be able to preserve VideoOverlay acceleration if you explicitly remove the OpenGLOverlay using:

Only 2 displays can be enabled at the same time. Any displays that are not on the list will be disabled.

Using an ACPI script, aticonfig can be used to switch displays on a key press.

The Catalyst Control Center, which comes with the driver (at least from Livna in Fedora Core 6) can be used to do this switching. It also does various other kinds of display managements. However, the version that comes with 8.39.4 doesn't seem to handle switching into Big Desktop mode, does anyone know how to get this to work? The control center also complains a lot about rebooting, but rebooting doesn't seem to be required. Does anyone have decent documentation for the control center?

ThinkPads that are NOT supported by fglrx

Note that glxgears isn't a benchmark tool, it's so simple that its FPS values is without any meaning... you can only compare glxgears using the same drivers/machine, if you change any of then you can have higher/lower values and in real life programs/games happen to have the opposite effects. Think in terms of a car engines rpms: higher rpms in the same car usually means a faster car, change anything and it's meaningless, ie: gears, truck, wheel size, etc. make it useless.